“Gook” is a drama set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Chon remembers watching the news coverage of the riots while his father left their house on the last night of the riots to protect the family’s shoe store.
A little over a year ago, actor and filmmaker Justin Chon posted a video on his YouTube channel, titled, “I HATE RACIST ACTING ROLES.” Chon filmed himself in his car, having just walked out on an audition after hearing from other Asian American actors who had just exited that the casting agency was belatedly asking for a fake Asian accent.
Aside from an admittedly regrettable decision of adopting a fake Chinese accent in a series of T-Mobile commercials early in his career, Chon, 36, has avoided stereotyped or cringingly racist roles. But as one of a few Asian American actors to have maintained a career (“Twilight,” “21 & Over”), Chon sees a greater responsibility than simply walking away from an audition room.
“If I’m going to say something about our current state of representation in American media, I’ve got to back up my talk, and I have to actually do something about it,” Chon says by phone from New York, the day after his new film, “Gook,” opened the New York Asian American Film Festival. The movie also can count audience awards at Sundance Film Festival and San Francisco’s CAAMFest among its many honors this year.
“Gook,” the second film that Chon has written and directed, not only gives center stage to Asian and African American leads, but also explores one of the most complex modern racial dynamics, between the Korean and black communities in South Central Los Angeles during the 1992 riots.
Opening in Bay Area theaters on Friday, Aug. 25, “Gook” takes place a day after the Rodney King trial verdict, focusing on the relationship between an 11-year-old black girl (Simone Baker) and two Korean brothers (Chon and David So) struggling to
Gook (R) opens Friday, Aug. 25, at Bay Area theaters.
keep their shoe store afloat in a predominantly black area.
Leading up to 2017, the 25th year since the riots, Chon had heard of films covering the events in the works. “Once I started seeing they were actually going to be made, and I got my hands on the scripts, it was very apparent that the Korean experience wasn’t going to be authentically told,” he says.
Chon remembers watching the news coverage while his father, Sang Chon, who plays a prominent role in the film, left their house on the last night of the riots to protect the family’s shoe store that had been looted. But, he says, his film is not a dissection of wrongs or rights, nor a story about picking sides.
The riots serve as the backdrop — primarily glimpsed in footage on television screens — for a film about friendship and family amid escalating tensions. “I don’t care about showing riot footage because for that you can watch a documentary,” Chon says.
For Chon, to tell of a certain “experience” — a notion that often becomes a pitfall for films that pigeonhole characters into representations of an entire race — is to simply give the real subjects a voice and humanity.
For instance, that means depicting Korean American blue-collar men fighting to survive, as opposed to the sometimes emasculated or crudely ethnic characterizations of Asian males in film and television.
And although Chon’s characters buck stereotypes, they are not defined by their victimhood. Instead they’re understood through a snapshot, a day in their lives that happens to culminate in dramatic circumstances attached to race. In this way, “Gook” draws parallels to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” — an essential film in any discussion of race, Chon says, but also one he specifically avoided rewatching before filming his own vision.
“My ultimate goal with the film is not to tell you what to think, but to create a conversation,” Chon says. Part of that conversation might force a reckoning with realities past and present, and racial histories beyond Los Angeles.
The film’s title, a Korean word that became a racial epithet during the Korean War and a general slur against Asians and Asian Americans, is not used for shock value, Chon says. Instead, it’s a sort of reflection of America — the Korean word itself translates, in a tragic twist of irony, to “country.” The discomfort of the title for viewers is purposeful.
“The connotation and the reason they feel uncomfortable is something that America created, not us” Asian Americans, he says.
Chon sees the film as relevant as ever, 25 years after the riots.
But if “Gook” remains a current picture of racial tension, its existence as a film about Asian American men and African Americans at least might show progress toward better cultural representation. The audience-voted awards “Gook” has won should indicate as much, Chon says.
Yet Chon, who partially crowdfunded a measly budget to make the film, appears passionately dissatisfied about the pace of progress. “People complain about whitewashing and underrepresentation, but when there is a voice or a tangible thing that can be made to counter that argument, I don’t understand why people don’t support it,” he says.
It’s that attitude that made him walk away from an audition room and make a film that helps break the dam.
“It’s undeniable that it’s a lot better than it was 10 years ago, that’s a fact,” Chon says. “Are we where we want to be? No! But I think we’re on the right track.”